SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITERS

Represented by Russell Galen

 

(Also see Russell’s Fiction titles, Nonfiction titles)

Science and natural history have been a lifelong passion for me and are areas in which I am particularly receptive to new clients. I represent working scientists; science journalists; and field guide authors who describe, paint, or photograph the natural world.

David Sibley. This list is going to be in alphabetical order, except for David. His Sibley Guide to Birds (Knopf, 2000) is one of the great achievements in natural history. It immediately became the best, and bestselling, of all guides to North American birds. In 7,000 paintings and 100,000 words it revolutionized the art of identifying wild birds. No one thought it could ever be equaled, but his Sibley Guide To Trees (Knopf, 2009), a masterwork of art and science, has done so.

Jonathan Alderfer. One of the great bird artists working today and a noted authority on birds, Alderfer is the chief advisor, consultant, and editor for the National Geographic Society’s birding programs, including the new edition of the formidable National Geographic Guide to North American Birds. Collaborating with equally renowned authority Jon Dunn, he is the author of Birding Essentials from National Geographic Books.

Philip Ball. An editor at Nature and author of marvelous hybrids of history and science, such as Bright Earth: Art And The Invention of Color; The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus And The World of Renaissance Magic and Science (both Farrar, Straus & Giroux); and Universe of Stone: Chartes Cathedral and the Origins of Order (HarperCollins).

Wayne Barlowe. Barlowe combines a keen understanding of animal physiology and anatomy (which he learned from his father, the great natural history illustrator Sy Barlowe); the imagination of a science fiction and fantasy author; and the storytelling ability of a great novelist. His classic book, Expedition (Workman), told the story of a mission to another planet rich with life and was illustrated with 200 of his paintings that illustrated how evolutionary processes might work in an alien environment. It was adapted for the Discovery Channel under the title Alien Planet.

Marcia Bartusiak. Director of MIT's science writing program and the author of several major books about cosmology. Her new project, The Day We Found The Universe (Pantheon) is a narrative about the discovery that the Milky Way was not the entire universe but just one small galaxy in an infinite, expanding universe. The discoverer, Edwin Hubble, was one of the most colorful scientists of all time and his larger-than-life personality makes this a vivid personal story that transcends popular science.

David Beadle and Seabrooke Leckie. These noted naturalists, illustrators, photographers, and science writers are teaming to write the first definitive guide to moths in a generation, to be published by Houghton Mifflin.

Dr. Les Beletsky. A wildlife biologist at the University of Washington, Les is renowned for his international perspective, culminating in his most ambitious work yet, Birds Of The World (Johns Hopkins University Press). He is also the author of Bird Songs, a remarkable book published by Chronicle which includes an audio device that plays back recordings of each bird’s song. His current project is International Birding (National Geographic Books).

Dr. Sean Carroll. He turned evolutionary biology on its head with his groundbreaking work on “evo devo,” the nickname for “evolutionary developmental biology.” His first two books, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science Of Evo Devo And The Making Of The Animal Kingdom and The Making Of The Fittest: DNA And The Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution (both W. W. Norton) were followed by the National Book Award finalist, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Stories In The Search For The Origins Of Species (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009).

Sir Arthur C. Clarke.  Best known as a grandmaster of science fiction and author of classics such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Childhood’s End, Sir Arthur, who died in 2007, was also the author of several hundred popular science books, articles, and papers, primarily in the area of his two greatest passions: outer space and the sea.

Marla Cone. Former environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times and now at Environmental Health news, author of Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning Of The Arctic (Grove/Atlantic).

Cameron Cox and Ken Behrens.  Authors of Seawatching (Houghton Mifflin, 2010), a groundbreaking natural history book about the unique confluence of birds and nature at the zone where land and sea meet, these are two young, globetrotting naturalists, birders, and outdoorsmen who represent the upcoming generation in nature study.

Dr. Ken Croswell. An astronomer and science author, his latest is Magnificent Mars (Free Press/Simon & Schuster), which combines a report on the latest Mars science with scores of breathtaking new close-up photographs of the planet.

Keay Davidson. Science correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of several popular science books, such as his biography, Carl Sagan (Wiley). He is now working on The Reluctant Revolutionary: A Life Of Thomas Kuhn for Oxford University Press.

Lydia Denworth. A former Newsweek and People bureau chief, Denworth's first book is Toxic Truth: A Scientist, A Doctor, And The Battle Over Lead (Beacon, 2009). It’s the dramatic story of two men who discovered the harmful effects of lead and their decades-long battle against the lead industry.

Rachel Dickinson. Ithaca, New York-based freelance writer Dickinson's first major book is Falconer On The Edge (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). As much a study of obsession as it is a book about nature, it follows one year in the life of a master falconer as he bonds with and trains his birds and hunts with them in the American West.

Cory Doctorow. Number 15 on Forbes’ list of the 25 most influential people on the Internet, Doctorow is an essayist, thinker, blogger, and critic on the subject of electronic media, the Internet, and the future of high-tech communication. He is also one of the most acclaimed of the new young generation of science fiction novelists and the author of the New York Times bestseller, Little Brother (2008), Makers (2009), and For the Win (2010), all from Tor Books.

Dr. Eric Jay Dolin. Dolin is an environmental scientist and an historian, combining both interests in books such as The Smithsonian Book Of National Wildlife Refuges and Leviathan: Whaling And The Making Of America (W. W. Norton). His current project is Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History Of The Fur Trade In America, a history of the American fur trade, to be followed by Far Eastern Fortune: The American China Trade in the Age of Sail, both for Norton.

Dr. Alan Dressler. An astronomer who made front pages the world over with his discoveries, Dressler is the author of Voyage To The Great Attractor: Exploring Intergalactic Space (Knopf) and New Human (Wiley).

Pete Dunne. Funny enough to be a stand-up comic; eloquent enough to be a poet; knowledgeable enough to be a scientist, Pete's package of charisma and information has never been matched. Books include Pete Dunne On Birding, The Feather Quest, and the magisterial Pete Dunne's Essential Field Guide Companion (Houghton Mifflin). He has currently embarked on a massive project for Houghton Mifflin in which he will do one book about each of the four seasons, focusing on the human, animal, and plant dramas that unfold in particular corners of North America from New Jersey to the far Arctic.

Rene Ebersole. Author of Gorilla Mountain: The Story Of Wildlife Biologist Amy Vedder (Joseph Henry Press), Rene is also a senior editor at Audubon and is widely published there and in many other major science and natural history magazines.

Lang Elliott. Lang has spent a lifetime obtaining recordings of animals in the wild and has done more than anyone to create an appreciation for the "soundscape" of nature. He is also a fine writer and photographer and has done many books containing CDs so that one can listen to, see, and read about a wild creature. Current projects for Houghton Mifflin are American Bird Songs; Frogs And Toads Of North America; and Night-singing Insects Of North America.

Tim Gallagher.  Tim is the author of the 2005 bestseller, The Grail Bird: Hot On The Trail Of The Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Houghton Mifflin), and also of Falcon Fever: A Falconer In The 21^st Century (Houghton Mifflin, 2008) which is not only a great book about birds but was voted one of the ten best sports books of the year by Booklist.  He is the editor of Living Bird, the magazine of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.

Suzie Gilbert. Flyaway (HarperCollins, 2009) is Gilbert’s often funny, often sad memoir of her years working as a bird rehabilitator out of her home, balancing the needs of young kids, a skeptical husband, and scores of injured crows, hawks, owls, nuthatches, and other wild birds.  It sold to HarperCollins for a record mid-six-figure advance.

Mark Harris. An environmental journalist whose first book is Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial (Scribner, 2007). It's an entertaining look at an interesting subculture: the world of environmentally-friendly burials. Thanks to my handling of this book I've decided to be buried at sea, and I look forward to some shark converting my flesh back to water, air, and earth in due time.

T. M. Hawley. Author Of Against The Fires Of Hell: The Environmental Disaster Of The Gulf War (Harcourt) and now at work on a very different book, Men And Oak (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) about the 5,000 years in which human history has been intertwined with the natural history of the oak.

John Himmelman. Himmelman's Discovering Moths is a classic that has introduced a generation to the unexpected delight of looking around in a nighttime back yard and discovering that your homely little world is host to hundreds of beautiful, bizarre flying creatures. He is now at work on Cricket Radio, a mixture of memoir and natural history about the world of nightsinging insects, for Harvard University Press, as well as a field guide to nightsinging insects (illustrated by Mike DiGiorgio) for Stackpole Books.

Steve N. G. Howell and Jon Dunn. These are two of the most knowledgeable and experienced authorities on birds anywhere on earth. Their latest collaboration is Gulls Of North America (Houghton Mifflin), the ultimate guide to learning about and identifying this fascinating family of birds.

Courtney Humphries. A Boston-based freelancer, Humphries has written about pediatric medicine and microscopes, but natural history is her first love. Her current project is Superdove: The Making Of The Pigeon, in which she studies the ubiquitous bird (one of the most successful wild species) and its unique relationship with man. The publisher is Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins.

Dr. Chris Impey. Professor of astronomy at Seward Observatory at the University of Arizona, author of The Living Cosmos for Random House. This book examines the search for life (in all forms, from primitive biochemical activity to cellular life to intelligent life) throughout the cosmos.

Kevin Karlson, Michael O'Brien, and Richard Crossley. Three of the finest birders in the world have combined to write and photograph The Shorebird Guide (Houghton Mifflin). More than just a superb field guide, the book revolutionizes birding with its introduction of "impressionistic birding," a new approach that emphasizes the overall impact of a bird rather than merely trying to find its field marks.

Ted Kerasote. One of the best-known contributors to magazines such as Outside and Audubon, Kerasote’s major national bestseller Merle's Door: How Dogs Might Live If They Were Free (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) has become one of the most popular animal books of all time and is destined to become a classic. It's a memoir of Ted's relationship with a feral dog that lived by hunting its own food, while returning to his home to continue their friendship, on his own schedule, for 13 years.

Dr. Donald Kroodsma. Don's work into the meaning of birdsong revolutionized our understanding of why birds sing and led to thirty years of adventures and studies in the wild. His The Singing Life of Birds won the 2006 Burroughs Medal for best nature book of the year and is followed by Birdsong by the Seasons (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Ed Lam. Lam is under contract to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for what will be one of the most ambitious, beautiful, and striking nature books ever attempted, Dragonflies of North America. Scheduled for publication in 2012, the book will contain nearly 2,500 of Lam's exquisite paintings of dragonflies, as well as his text and range maps. In modern times, only Roger Tory Peterson's and David Sibley's guides to birds equal it as demonstrations of the magnificence of natural history illustration, and of the splendid insanity of a single artist devoting so many years to depicting so many creatures in such detail.

Gentry Lee. One of the most significant contributors to the American space program, Lee has designed and run several of the most exciting projects at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He collaborated with Carl Sagan on the book and television versions of Cosmos and with Arthur C. Clarke on several bestselling science fiction novels before publishing his own science fiction novels such as Double Full Moon Night.

Daniel Mathews and Jim Jackson. Creators of one of the most innovative field guides ever conceived, America From The Air (Houghton Mifflin). Curious to identify that mountain, river, or desert, city, or farmland 30,000 feet below as you fly from Chicago to L. A.? This book will enable you to do that.

Lynne McTaggart. Author of controversial science books in which cutting-edge new-age ideas are married with hard science, McTaggart’s unique role as the bridge between mysticism and the laboratory has led to bestsellers such as The Field: The Quest For The Secret Force Of The Universe (HarperCollins, 2001); The Intention Experiment: Can Your Thoughts Change The World? (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2008) and Manifesto For A New World (Simon & Schuster, 2011).

Richard Milner. The longtime editor/contributor to Natural History, his Darwin's Universe (University of California Press, 2009) is a gigantic, authoritative, richly-illustrated compendium of everything there is to know about evolution. Is it a reference book? Is it a popular science narrative? It's a little of both, a great reading experience that is also an encyclopedia.

Elizabeth Rosenthal.  Her definitive biography of one of my heroes, Roger Tory Peterson, was published by Globe Pequot/Lyons Press to coincide with Peterson’s 100th birthday in 2008. Please see her web site at www.petersonbird.com for more information.

Dr. Amy Seidl.  An ecologist with Middlebury College and the Living Future Organization, Dr. Seidl is also a young mother who lives with her family in rural Vermont. Her first book, Early Spring: An Ecologist And Her Children Wake To A Warming World (Beacon), is a poetic, poignant, but also hard-science look at what global warming is doing to her tiny corner of Vermont.  It is about the effect of climate change on butterflies and blueberries today, rather than about Miami being flooded and palm trees growing in Alaska some day in the future.

Dr. Craig Stanford. The University of Southern California primatologist is the author of Upright: The Evolutionary Key to Becoming Human (Houghton Mifflin), Significant Others: The Ape-Human Continuum and the Quest for Human Nature (Basic), and other works. His current project is The Last Tortoise (Harvard University Press), in which he takes a break from apes to celebrate the natural history of one of the most fascinating creatures in the world, the tortoise.

George Scott & Charles Nix. Charles Nix is one of the foremost book designers in the world, and George Scott is one of the most experienced packagers and producers of illustrated, complex nature books. Working with scientist, naturalist, and writer Ted Floyd and a team of science advisors, photographers and cartographers under the aegis of the Smithsonian Institution, they created The Smithsonian Field Guide To The Birds Of North America (Collins, 2008): the best of all the photographic guides to North American birds.

Dr. Greg Shriver. A conservation biologist at the University of Delaware, Shriver’s definitive guide to sparrows will be published by Houghton Mifflin in 2010.

Will Stolzenburg. A wildlife biologist and widely published journalist, and former editor for Nature Conservancy Magazine, his first book is Where The Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Mayhem In a Land of Vanishing Predators (Bloomsbury USA, 2008). This is a lively portrait of scientists at work as they develop a controversial new theory about the role of predation in the environment.

Bill Thompson III. Bill has led the teams that have created many books sponsored by the magazine he edits, Bird Watcher's Digest. Most recently Identify Yourself (Houghton Mifflin) gave invaluable tips on the birding world's thorniest identification problems. Bill’s solo effort, The Young Birder’s Guide To The Birds of Eastern North America, was published in 2008. Next up is a three book series on back yard birding from Houghton Mifflin. 

Dr. Robert Tuckerman. A Toronto-based evolutionary biologist and scientific illustrator, author of a heavily illustrated masterwork, Darwin's Orchids (University of California Press, 2010). There's nothing like this book. The text tells the story of Darwin's work on orchids and their insect pollinators, which enabled him to grasp the concept of co-evolution. Tuckerman's illustrations of these flowers and bugs are the zenith of scientific illustration both for their beauty and their ability to teach what words alone cannot teach.

Mira Tweti. A frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times and other publications on matters involving animals and nature, her first book, Of Parrots And People: The Sometimes Funny, Always Fascinating, and Often Catastrophic Collision of Two Intelligent Species (Viking, 2007) celebrates both the intense bond between people and their parrots, and the appalling crimes of traffickers who smuggle parrots into the U.S.

Cal Vornberger. Cal's nature photographs are unique. Their beauty and clarity are unrivaled, but more important, each one contains a Shakespearean level of drama, conflict, and action in their depiction of the world of New York City birds. These pictures, along with Cal's entertaining and informative text, have appeared in two books, Birds of Central Park (Abrams) and Predators of New York City.

Julie Zickefoose. The greatest triple threat in natural history since Roger Tory Peterson, she is a biologist, nature writer, and painter. Her first book was Letters From Eden, a collection of her essays and paintings (Houghton Mifflin), followed by Life Birds (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).